Locations

The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Background

Dr. Ralph Hruban is a professor of pathology and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. A world-renowned pancreatic cancer pathology expert, his areas of clinical expertise include pancreatic cancer and its precursors, neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas and pancreatic pathology.

His research contributions include the characterization of PanINs, the precursor lesions that give rise to invasive pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Hruban is the Baxley Professor and Director of the Department of Pathology. He also serves as director of the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center at Johns Hopkins and is a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

After receiving an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, Dr. Hruban continued his residency training in anatomic pathology at Johns Hopkins. He then completed a fellowship in surgical pathology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and returned to join the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1990.

Dr. Hruban co-founded the National Familial Pancreas Tumor Registry at Johns Hopkins in 1994, created an award-winning iPad application to teach pancreas pathology (the Johns Hopkins Atlas of Pancreatic Pathology) and an iPAD and iPhone APP for patients with pancreatic cancer (the Johns Hopkins iCareBook). He also produced an award-winning documentary on the life of William Stewart Halsted, Hopkins’ first surgeon-in-chief.

He has authored more than 700 peer-reviewed manuscripts and five books, including the standard textbook on pancreatic pathology (the AFIP Fascicle on Tumors of the Pancreas) and the World Health Organization “blue book” on tumors of the digestive tract. He is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a highly cited researcher and by Essential Science Indicators as the most highly cited pancreatic cancer scientist.

Dr. Hruban has received numerous awards including the Arthur Purdy Stout Prize for significant career achievements in surgical pathology, the Ramzi Cotran Award from the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, the PanCAN Medical Visionary Award, the Ranice W. Crosby Distinguished Achievement Award in Art as Applied to Medicine, the Ruth C. Brufsky Award of Excellence in Clinical Research for Pancreatic Cancer, the Frank Netter Award for Special Contributions to Medical Education, the Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Alumni Award, the Team Science Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, and five teaching awards from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2013.

Centers & Institutes

Education

Degrees

Residencies

Fellowships

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center / Pathology (1989)

Board Certifications

American Board of Pathology / Anatomic Pathology
(1990)

Research & Publications

Research Summary

The goals of Dr. Hruban’s research are to understand the noninvasive precursor lesions from which invasive pancreatic cancers develop (PanINs and IPMNs); why pancreatic cancer aggregates in some families; and the pathologic ramifications of genetic alterations in the pancreas. Toward these goals, Dr. Hruban has applied molecular genetics to the study of noninvasive precursor lesions in the pancreas and to patients with familial pancreatic cancer. A better understanding of these lesions and families may provide an avenue for the early detection of pancreatic cancer.